Homeless agency wakes up to messy hotel rooms with financial audit of a murky operator

Bad enough that the city's welfare agency is on track to spend $2 billion (you read that right) this year on homeless services, more than the salaries of every firefighter in the five boroughs combined.

Bad enough that a sizeable share of the more than 60,000 people sheltered by the city Department of Homeless Services sleep and wake in hotel rooms that cost more to rent each month than a luxury apartment.

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Bad enough that last year the city signed $1.1 billion in contracts to put homeless people in nearly 4,000 hotel rooms through 2020, renewable through 2026 — even as Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks says he's moving to cease using hotels entirely, because "our homeless neighbors deserve better."

No — even worse. So hastily did city officials rush to sign up a supply of hotels that t's lost their crosses, and i's their dots.

A nonprofit group called Childrens Community Services, slated to receive $417 million under two contracts signed last year that pay as much as $8,300 a month for each hotel room, including social services, will now be getting a financial audit, and see its operations pared back, after the Daily News editorial board raised red flags about the group's spotty financial records and history.

"History" being a generous word for a group founded only in 2014, shortly before DHS began to pay it to put families into so-called cluster apartments. Its founding board chairman and CEO, Thomas Bransky, arrived in New York from Illinois with no background to speak of in administering services on a large scale to hundreds of needy families at a time, or shepherding them to permanent housing.

Records submitted to the state attorney general and Internal Revenue Service show a group running deep in the red, and using a UPS Store in Queens as the registered address for nearly half a billion dollars in contracts with DHS.

Bransky reports he loaned the organization $100,000 to start with, then never paid himself more than $33,000 and change for this full-time gig, with no reported income from related entities but a pile of high-interest loans on the group's books.

No one seriously involved in homeless services had ever heard of the guy.

In its scramble to shelter the homeless, DHS has had a knack for finding dubious middlemen, one of whom, a donor to Mayor de Blasio named Yitzchok Leshinsky, pleaded guilty last year to skimming shelter funds.

Who exactly is DHS in bed with this time? Outside auditors will find out what agency officials decided they had no need to know.